"'I've had enough of you,' he snarled, bristling up his quills as if he counted on sticking some of them into me. 'After the way you went back on me in that scrape Bobby Coon got me into, I'm through with the whole Rabbit family, from this out. Just keep your eye on me, and you'll see that I'll even up that business before I'm many days older.'
"Of course I couldn't have him holding out against me like that, for I knew he might make lots of trouble if he tried very hard, and then again it didn't seem right to blame me for what I really couldn't help, so I talked as softly as I knew how, smoothing things over till he said, still acting grumpy:
"'Well, what do you want of me? I happen to know that you've been hunting high and low this past hour, and if that meddling Jay hadn't run across me by accident, you'd still be scurrying around as if I were the best friend you had in the world.'
"'That's just what I count you are, Jimmy,' and I nestled as near his nose as I could without filling myself full of quills. That seemed to quiet him down a little and I went on to explain about Mr. Turtle; telling Jimmy how sick the old fellow looked. I expected every minute that he'd give it to me hard for trying to stuff him with any such yarn as that old Slowly had the toothache, but, do you know, he never thought about Mr. Turtle's not having teeth, and asked, as if he'd got real interested in the story:
"'What does he think I can do? I'm no dentist's shop.'
"When I told him that Slowly believed the pain was caused by his getting a piece of snail's shell in his teeth, and that he could fix himself up all right if he had a hedgehog quill for a toothpick, that foolish Jimmy swallowed the story, shell and all.
"'I'm allowing that I'm the only one of the wood folks who really amounts to anything in the way of usefulness,' he said, grinning like a jack o' lantern, and shaking his quills till I had to get out in the open for fear some of them would strike me. 'If I can help old Mr. Turtle, of course I must do it; but you wait till the president of your blooming old club gets into trouble that nobody but me can pull him out of, and see how long it'll be before I so much as lift a paw! I wouldn't give that beggar Jim Crow one of my quills, not if he was starving to death!'
"I wanted to ask Jimmy how much good he thought one of his quills would do to a crow who was starving to death; but held my tongue, because I didn't want to stir him up while he was in such a good humor, and if I poked the least little bit of fun at him he might decide that he wouldn't go to Mr. Turtle, in which case I'd miss the fun I was counting on.
"Well, Jimmy strutted out from under the fir bushes, shaking himself to look big, and walking as if he thought he was the only thing in the big woods, while I hipperty-hopped at his side, but taking mighty good care not to get so near that there was any danger of being scratched. You don't want to think that he was feeling any too friendly with me, even though we two were getting along so peaceably and every now and then he'd stop to threaten what he was going to do because I'd told the truth about the Bobby Coon business.
"I let him go on as wildly as he pleased, for I was thinking to myself all the time that Jimmy would soon be having a hard time if things went the way Mr. Crow and old Slowly had figured, and it was all I could do to keep myself from laughing right out loud, I felt so tickled. It seemed to me that Mr. Crow wouldn't hatch out a plan that could go wrong, and Mr. Turtle was so terribly in earnest about playing his part of it that I had good reason to think Jimmy would have the hot end of the stick before long, with me right on hand to see the whole game.